Melbourne's Toxic West

Melbourne's Western suburbs are home to around 60% of Australia's chemical industry. The industry's chemicals are imported and stored at the infamous Coode Island facility in Footscray and at Point Gellibrand Pier in Williamstown. These chemicals are then transported to various facilities in the region for production into adhesives, plastics, petrochemicals and other such products.

Many of the industries in Melbourne's West use aging technology and have facilities which are certainly not 'World's Best Practice', a term the industry loves to use to describe any planned expansions.

Australia's largest Petrochemical complex is the Altona Petrochemical Complex situated in Altona. It is home to such companies as BASF, Dow Chemicals, Hoechst, Kemcor and AUSEON. The complex began life in the early 1960's, a time when accepted waste disposal practices were primitive to say the least. Dow Chemicals carried out a waste disposal method called Deep Well Injection in the 1960's and 1970's. A crude method of drilling deep holes into the ground and simply pouring waste into them. Out of site and out of mind and very cheap.

As a result of these dubious practices there is now a large area of ground water contaminated with chlorinated compounds spreading out from the plant . A report by the CSIRO in December 1993 found a 'contaminated front" made up of a 'cocktail' of different chemicals including chlorinated materials and heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, was moving towards Port Phillip Bay at a rate of between 500-1000 metre each year. This contaminated mix is expected to hit the bay some time in the next ten years.

The Western Region of Melbourne is also home to the Werribee Treatment Complex, a facility which handles around 60% of Melbourne's sewage and a large percentage of its industrial waste. The complex discharges around 167,000 megalitres of sewage and industrial waste directly into Port Phillip Bay every year. It is conservatively estimated to contribute 1 tonne of lead, 36 tonnes of surfactants, 2 kg of mercury, 5 tonnes of zinc, 2 kg of cadmium, 1.8 tones of copper and 4 tonnes of nickel each year to the bay.

Huntsman Chemicals in Footscray is yet another huge company in the area which contributes enormous amounts of waste into the environment. Each year Huntsman either buries and incinerates over 2,870 tonnes of hazardous waste, not to mention the 140,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases it pumps out into our atmosphere each year

These examples are just a small sample of what is happening in the area. There is also Mobil's huge refinery at Altona which emits 20,000 kg of pollution into the air everyday, the Command Incinerator in Laverton that has emissions up to 750 times in excess of German standards for dioxins, a substance that can cause developmental effects in humans and Nufarm Pesticides, also in Laverton, was temporarily shut down in 1990 by the Government for illegally dumping toxic waste into the sewer system.

HAZMAG believes firmly in the principle of 'community right to know' , a right for members of a community to access information about chemicals such as their hazards, health effects, where they are stored and other related matters.

HAZMAG feels that one of the best tools for changing Government and industry is legislation that will entrench the rights of communities to access information. Overseas examples of "right to know' legislation have lead to huge decreases in air emissions and toxic waste. When individuals know what is happening and have the facts it is very powerful lobbying tool to achieve change.